May 2016 Notes

May FTF will commence at 1400 on Sunday the 22nd at Training Area West. Subjects to cover are Secure Comms and RECON Patrols. Summertime is here and we’re all out and about a lot more, so we’ll try making SPOT Reports again for a while.

NC PATCON starts 1June. If you can make the trip, even just for the Saturday session, we need to send our monies in by the 20th.

Every year, more than a million pounds of illegal drugs pass over the U.S. border from Mexico. Arizona is one of the busiest sectors for marijuana seizures, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. And now more than ever, groups of men and women from all over the country — including here in North Carolina — are taking it upon themselves to watch over the border.

It’s a trip sponsored by groups like the 3% United Patriots and OathKeepers, who rally support and funding online.

The men and women who make up the nongovernment organizations are from all across the country and motivated by many different reasons.

The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that North Carolina has about 325,000 “unauthorized” immigrants, giving the state the ninth-highest illegal immigrant population in the U.S.

The use of cyber capabilities has also facilitated the rise of 4GW in the Syrian conflict. Previously, it was difficult for a belligerent to directly communicate with, yet alone attack, the civilian population of their enemy. However, with social media, non-state actors like ISIL can directly publicize their message to global audiences and encourage internal lone wolf attacks on their enemies. The use of cyber capabilities has allowed these groups to directly target the enemy’s civilian population, which has made 4GW possible. The success of this strategy against Western nations will likely encourage other actors to employ 4GW in the future.

Lesson to be learned here concerning 4GW: drop out of social media as much as you can and as quick as you can. Our own government employs minions with the task of, for lack of a better term, Counter Intelligence, and just because you’re not interested in them, doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in you.

As a long-time user of Tails and Tor, it was always a nagging concernthat there might be something basically wrong with using an internet tool designed by DARPA for use in the worst case scenario of getting your important data thru on a poorly performing internet, compromised either by accident or by design, i. e. clandestine use by resistance groups in countries where the government has shut down or severely restricted internet usage. This isn’t “Network Magic” or even something even slightly secret. It’s all in the routing and the guys at DARPA know how that works and that’s why they came up with Tor. Tails is just a stripped bare and clean environment that provide the platform to run Tor.

So it should be nobig surprise that someone who worked on the Tor Project lucked in to a job with those data security experts at the FBI to develop software for them to exploit Tor. You think the FBI might automatically see all Tor users as criminals? Maybe we should just store all our important data on a cloud server (also known as the Utah Data Center) for safe keeping.

Matt Edman is a cybersecurity expert who worked as a part-time employee at Tor Project, the nonprofit that builds Tor software and maintains the network, almost a decade ago.

Since then, he’s developed potent malware used by law enforcement to unmask Tor users. It’s been wielded in multiple investigations by federal law-enforcement and U.S. intelligence agencies in several high-profile cases.

By 2012, Edman was working at Mitre Corporation as a senior cybersecurity engineer assigned to the FBI’s Remote Operations Unit, the bureau’s little-known internal team tapped to build or buy custom hacks and malware for spying on potential criminals. With an unparalleled pedigree established from his time inside the Tor Project, Edman became an FBI contractor tasked with hacking Tor as part of Operation Torpedo, a sting against three Dark Net child pornography sites that used Tor to cloak their owners and patrons.

In addition to working on Operation Torpedo, Edman also did dozens of hours of work on the federal case against Silk Road, the first major Dark Net marketplace, and its convicted creator Ross Ulbricht. According to testimony, it was Edman who did the lion’s share of the job tracing $13.4 million in bitcoins from Silk Road to Ulbricht’s laptop, which played a key role in Ulbricht being convicted and sentenced to two life terms in federal prison. Edman worked as a senior director at FTI Consulting at the time.

Yeah? So what. Everyone here by now must realize that they will not stop. Learn how to use TOR bridges and OBFS4 proxies. Learn to run layered tunnels (VPN-Bridge-TOR-VPN). Learn to setup hardened access-points and run virtual routers that can be burned on demand. Don’t let their shenanigans paralyse you…

Also reference a little of that same material in the article below:

When using Tor with Tails in its default configuration, anyone who can observe the traffic of your Internet connection (for example your Internet Service Provider and perhaps your government and law enforcement agencies) can know that you are using Tor.

This may be an issue if you are in a country where the following applies:

1. Using Tor is blocked by censorship: since all connections to the Internet are forced to go through Tor, this would render Tails useless for everything except for working offline on documents, etc.

2. Using Tor is dangerous or considered suspicious: in this case starting Tails in its default configuration might get you into serious trouble.

Tor bridges, also called Tor bridge relays, are alternative entry points to the Tor network that are not all listed publicly. Using a bridge makes it harder, but not impossible, for your Internet Service Provider to know that you are using Tor.

UPDATE — FromThe Intercept, not only is the FBI exploiting some weakness in Tor, but they recently took over one website and injected malware onto the computers visiting that site that made them traceable. There is a lawsuit and the FBI is having to provide details on the exploit. The more interesting thing is that Mozilla, the makers of Firefox browser, want to see those details first because, yep, you guessed it, Tor browser is based on Firefox code which means a vulnerability in one is an exploit in the other.

“Insurgencies are easy to make and hard to stop. Only a few ingredients need to combine to create an insurgency; like oxygen and fire, they’re very common and mix all too often. The recipe is, simply, a legitimate grievance against a state, a state that refuses to compromise, a quorum of angry people, and access to weapons.”

Like this:

> tensmiths posted: “May FTF will commence at 1400 on Sunday the 22nd at > Training Area West. Subjects to cover are Secure Comms and RECON > Patrols. Summertime is here and we’re all out and about a lot more, so > we’ll try making SPOT Reports again for a while. NC PAT” >